Beltway braces for ‘House of Cards’ Season 2

Netflix released the second season of its original series “House of Cards” on Friday, and media and politicos can’t wait to settle into 13 straight hours of a show that centers on the very industry in which they work and live every day.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Whether they’re planning to power through the whole season in a single night or space it out over the coming weeks, the show’s loyal fans can’t stop talking about the next chapter for D.C.’s shadow cast.

“It’s a fun escape from what day-to-day life on the Hill is actually like,” said Alex Conant, press secretary for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), in an interview. He plans to dive into the show right away. “It makes politics in Washington appear even worse than it is, which is a feat.”

Conant was one of many to take to Twitter on Wednesday night encouraging Netflix to release the series a day early when federal government offices were closed for bad weather.

While it might seem ironic for people working in politics and journalism to “escape” to a show about, well, politics and journalism, Conant isn’t alone in the sentiment. Hill staffers and journalists alike want the show to take them out of their own offices and newsrooms and into the offices of Frank Underwood and Slugline.

“I hope to be totally entertained, to completely dragged out of my world and into a fantasy of what goes on Capitol Hill,” said Fox News host Greta Van Susteren in an interview, of her expectations for the new season.

Van Susteren, who falls into the watch-it-all-in-one-night camp, called the show “addictive” and gushed over the talented acting of Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.

“There are painful similarities to reality,” she said. “Obviously we don’t have people murdering other members of Congress, at least not yet … but I think it gives you sort of the painful underbelly of wheeling and dealing that can happen in a political environment.”

One reason the show might strike such a following in Washington is simply that there aren’t that many shows based here, and the ones that are tend to glorify the job rather than dramatize it, said Atlantic Senior Editor Eleanor Barkhorn. A New York native, she said it didn’t matter that the show wasn’t filmed in D.C., just the fact that it was taking place here reminds people that Washington is interesting and important and fun.

“It’s obviously so dramatic,” Barkhorn, a fan of the show, said. “’West Wing’ has this very noble, self-congratulatory attitude about working in Washington, and ‘House of Cards’ is a little more playful, a little darker, and doesn’t take Washington as seriously.”

“When the ‘West Wing’ was on, people used to ask me all the time ‘is that what it’s really like?’ Nobody’s ever asked me that about ‘House of Cards,’” he said.

Another reason the city might be so into the show are the tiny glimpses of D.C. that do actually strike home.

“It’s chock-full of cameos,” said CNN’s Reliable Sources host and senior media correspondent Brian Stelter, who will be on the lookout for more real politicos making a showing when he catches the first few episodes with his fiancée on Valentine’s Day.

For Barkhorn, it’s the mysterious government vehicles lurking outside of public buildings that take her in between fiction and reality.

“It always freaks me out whenever I see one of those black Suburbans idling outside of a building,” she said. “I think ‘there’s about to be something awful.”’

Though the picture HOC paints of D.C. isn’t a pretty one, fans of the show have no hard feelings about their jobs being misrepresented.

“The idea that it mixes fantasy with horror is what I find so interesting about it,” Stelter said. “In some moments it’s a fantasy about how Washington could work, in other moments it’s a horror movie.”

For Conant, asked whether he thought the darkness of “House of Cards” could give viewers outside the Beltway the wrong idea about Washington, he said D.C. got its current reputation all on its own.

“Let’s face it,” Conant said. “Washington is unpopular because our country faces big challenges that Congress is failing to address — not because of a TV show.”